


first i'll change all in your arms

by carterhaugh



Category: Dark Matter - Michelle Paver
Genre: Ballad 39: Tam Lin, Comes Back Wrong, Dark Matter fic exchange 2019, Hopeful Ending, Inhumanity, M/M, description of corpses, edit 2021: undergoing rewrite when i can find the time, major character death is gus following on from the book’s ending; no new deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:17:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21891064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carterhaugh/pseuds/carterhaugh
Summary: The dead thing may be gone from Gruhuken, but Gus still walks.
Relationships: Gus Balfour/Jack Miller
Comments: 5
Kudos: 8





	first i'll change all in your arms

**Author's Note:**

> In which I write yet another Tam Lin allegory. First time writing fanfiction. For @tulliver on Tumblr as part of the Dark Matter fic exchange.

It’s cold where he is.

The Arctic seas offer little comfort, even to a dead thing. Time is told only in the slow movement of light and long stretches of darkness on the ocean’s surface that herald the seasons’ turning. These changes are largely irrelevant - here, far below the bay, what little light that reaches him is weak and shifting, illuminating little else other than the silhouette of his hand turned up toward the surface. 

What is left of his hand.

What he is now is something disparate, strange to himself in a way that is not man and corpse. More like when, a lifetime ago, when he was alive and studying at Oxford, he found a moth dead halfway out of its cocoon on his windowsill, delicate and pale and skeletal and ghastly. Unable to withstand the winter. 

He had forgotten the moth in seconds when he was alive. Now, halfway-dead, he remembers. Perhaps this death has changed him more than he thought. 

Gruhuken is abandoned, now, for the most part. The wind sighs heavy over the empty bay, loud and abrasive enough to scuff the surface of the waves and echo down to where he lies. The seagulls cry and wheel, and make their nests in the cliffs surrounding the bay. Occasionally, feathers drift down and rest upon the water. 

Trappers come through, with their dogs and their supplies - he hears the barking, and some part of him remembers fur under his hands, paw prints in the snow, the bright and glorious first days of the expedition when all had seemed possible and open to them. 

It seems distantly unfair that this was what awaited them of anyone, but it is hard to feel anything in the freezing waters below the bay and he manages to muster only a dull surge of anger and frustration. Both are things he was unaccustomed to enough in life that their dimness is not so strange to him, only a slight ache at their absence.

If the creature that haunted the bear pole walked the land, terrorising all that came near, Gus defies it in the only way he can. He stays deep under the ice, rocked by the cold and the dark and the silence. He is alone now. Whatever used to stalk in the darkness of the bay is gone. Folklore was never his area of study when he was alive, but he remembers man-who-tricked-the-devil-stories and ghost-stories told in whispers and scribbles late at night and thinks of trades, some sort of terrible bargain, of fair exchange. A life for a life. A death for a death. He doesn’t know if it was intentional. 

It’s the last months of his life that he remembers in stark detail, the excitement and the adventure, so like Jim Hawkins and Robinson Crusoe and Davy Balfour, his favourite because they shared a name. He strains to remember parents, loves, rooms, gardens, but can only ever assemble a vague concept of them. They are soft and fuzzed around the edges, muted and absent and yet painfully there if only he could reach for them, not dissimilar to the pain born of trying to focus through a headache. Pressure behind the eyes. 

He remembers them like a lullaby sung to him years ago. 

He worries at the memories like a loose tooth.

He knows they’re scattered to the winds now, his expedition. He’s unsurprised by this. The bonds between them were not strong enough to withstand the aftermath. (Guiltily, he thinks to himself, to withstand the loss of him.) At first, they are lost again into the heaving cogs of London, three of them, swallowed up by the smog and the filth and the masses. One goes south, to the Caribbean, and tries to burn the cold and the horror and Gus out of himself with warmth and routine and Isaak, a loyal companion still. He is aware of these things, faintly - the sea whispers some to him, the rest come to him in fragments of someone else’s vision. Sometimes they are comforting. 

Sometimes painful. 

This is how he knows when his best friend emerges from the surging crowds of London. Even close to the Thames as it is, London is far enough inland that he only knows after the ship sets sail with the waves rolling against the prow and Algie on board, bound for the Caribbean. It isn’t hard to guess who he’s going to see - and it comforts him, at least, that that tie held enough for Jack not to be left alone. His almost-brother and his almost-something-else. Jack. That day on the ship, Jack dark against the endless sea, the wild beauty of the land seemed to echo what he saw in Jack’s face. 

Abruptly, he’d felt wrong-footed, as if he was teetering on the brink of some new beginning. Not just the expedition, the research, but something wide and strange and fascinating. Something he’d wanted to know. He hadn’t looked away. He’d taken it as a sign of good luck, for the expedition. These are the things that anchor him now, beneath the ice. This is what keeps him halfway-human.

The dock is close enough to Jack’s workplace that mad barking greets Algie minutes after his ship is moored. Isaak seems none the worse for wear after his experiences, unsubdued and settling into his new life. He knows this instinctively because he is part of the sea now, one of its drowned folk, and so he is somehow there at the dockside, hearing the warm voices filtering down through the water. Warmth is something that doesn’t exist where he is, everything glacial among the silver fish that flicker in and out of the darkness, and even in the sunlit waters of the Caribbean he is cold. In the freezing temperatures of the Arctic they had at least had their own heat against the frost, the knowledge that heart and blood and lungs were pumping, keeping them stubbornly alive, but the blood in his veins has long since congealed and the skin itself is grey and peeling. 

He knows, from his textbooks, what happens to drowned bodies, has detachedly watched for the signs of it in his own, but he still has both of his hands and his chest hasn’t bloated and he still has all his hair though even underwater it is slick and dark and determinedly plastered to his head, not a trace of blonde left. He is caught between life and death like a beetle in resin, and perhaps that is the worst part, because he feels so close to life that he can almost believe that Jack could lean down from the docks and haul him up from the water and back into the air. His fingers are numb with cold, and he thinks longingly of Jack’s hand on his, heat and light and warmth. 

That night, he comes to the surface for the first time since his drowning. The seawater is lit up with the glow of lights from the observatory, and the sound of laughter and bottles clinking echoes across the sea. He thinks, just once, that he can hear Jack among the chatter, and is desperately grateful to Algie with a force that shocks him, cold and distant as he is now. Still, the warmth on the water draws him, and he briefly longs to be there, hand on Jack’s back, laughing in a corner, flushed with wine and good cheer. Touch is beyond him now, lost as he is to the water. Tonight, though, the ocean is purpled with the dusk and the waves lap against him as he floats some distance from the shore. It’s almost unnaturally calm tonight, a stark change from the storming seas of Gruhunken, so calm that it takes very little effort to keep his head and shoulders above the waves. It is the most human he has felt since his drowning, though some part of him is unpleasantly aware that this strange calm is likely due to his condition; still, he thinks he is allowed some denial if it brings him a measure of peace. The party lasts until the early hours, sea turning from purple to deep blue to black as the wine flows and people come out laughing and clinging onto the balcony in groups of twos and fours and sixes. They stumble into the night air with arms hooked around waists and hands pressed to shoulders, legs tangling and heads colliding as they lean over the railing. A woman presses her mouth to her companion’s cheek as they gaze at the sunset, leaving sticky-bright lipstick in her wake. 

It is this that draws him closer, fish to the bait, until he is so near that even underwater he can see the wineglass as it falls toward him, knocked from the balcony by a clumsy hand. He catches the stem of it and watches the wine dilute and turn the water around it even darker, almost opaque, almost laughs as he thinks about the bizarreness of this inverted ritual, those above in tailored suits and him below in the clothes he died in. Recklessly, he surfaces with the glass, hoping to somehow return it, but the balcony is empty again and too high to reach from the sea. Instead, he empties the water from the glass and allows it to float away toward the beach just beyond the rocks that the observatory and house protrude from. 

When he dares to look through the doors leading to the balcony, he catches sight of sensible furniture pushed to the sides of the room and a chandelier full of candles so bright it burns him to look, but no Jack. No sign of Algie, either, though, and if there is one thing he is glad of it is that Jack is not alone in the aftermath. He wonders if Algie does it as a favour to his memory or out of genuine care; he hopes for the latter. He is well aware of how lonely Jack is beneath the brittle exterior. There’s little for him to stay for without their presence, and already he feels a cold current begin to curl around him, but the flush of life and light has warmed him enough to resist it for now. Its presence is unwelcome enough to make him entertain the mad idea of leaving the sea for the party, even soaked as he is; to perhaps slide seamlessly back into mortal company as if he had never left it. 

The quiet comfort of the sea and the light scattered across the night from the open windows have put a measure of life back into him; he feels a wry amusement at his own imaginings, but still as yet unwilling to relinquish the touch of warmth tentatively spreading through him, he heads for the dark curve of the far beach. He hopes perhaps for one last night of almost-humanity, to watch the house lights dim and the guests wind slowly away to their safe places and warm beds, supporting each other as they go. He doesn’t imagine he’ll remain himself for much longer; the dark and the deep do not just eat at his body but also at his mind, and he feels the creeping rot like a living thing, the whispering in the depths dragging him farther and farther from himself until he is completely lost. 

It is possible that the thing that walked at Gruhunken never intended to walk but was driven to do so by the cold and the dark and the silence consuming every part of it until it was nothing but the still-smouldering rage; he feels the current brush against his legs again, and he knows it has started. The real menace may never have been the poor creature left to stalk the bay - perhaps there is some greater, older thing that flits and haunts and lingers in the cliffs and the seagulls and the bottomless bay; some devouring cold that gnaws any intruders down to the bone and requires a price for every trespass, that wants him for its own. Certainly the way its presence darts in and out from his awareness feels like an unpleasant attempt to both remind him of his dead-walking state and to hold him still distant from the world, still frozen. 

The sand of the beach surprises him when his feet scrape against it. Caught up, he had not noticed how far in the sea had swept him; though he is still underwater, his head is barely covered, and likely visible from shore. The touch of the sand grains grazing against his skin is almost painful; it is only now that he realises how long it has been since he was anything but suspended in water, weightless and drifting, and the sensation of physical touch is not unpleasant but is not dissimilar to a scalding bath or tea new-boiled - erring on the edge of pain but not enough for him to stop touching. He drags his feet through the sand and shell pieces again, slow and meandering - his limbs are heavy and flop disconcertingly, bones and joints still limp, but as he moves he feels himself gradually acclimatise to ground under his feet again. It is an odd sensation, suspended between the sea and the shore, but the movement is soothing and he watches how the grains swirl and spiral through the dark water until he hears the first noise.  
It’s a cutoff sob. The water chokes the sound of it, but he’s close enough to the surface to hear and so when he surfaces to investigate, he sees the dark shape silhouetted against the land. It heaves again. Unthinkingly, he moves toward it, and slowly the shape resolves itself into a figure; dark hair, dark eyes, and a hand missing two fingers thrown messily across its face as it sobs. It’s Jack.

What blood there is in him is congealed long ago, but his heart thumps dully regardless; Jack is barely a few metres away, and shaking, and he is suddenly and terribly afraid of the consequences of his coming here as a spectre in the night. Jack cries exactly as he would have expected, silent and shuddering, his whole body tensed back and head tipped up to the sky. There’s an awful practice to the way he holds himself that tells Gus that this is not the first time Jack has mourned like this, and he wonders bitterly if it is as much a part of the evening as going to bed, if Jack creeps out here nightly to be alone with his grief. His face is wet with tears, now, and they shine in the moonlight, illuminating the curve of a cheekbone, the socket of an eye, the curve of his neck. He’s terribly lovely, even like this, even red-eyed and messy-haired, and so very far away from the person Gus knew, and he feels guilt strike him bolt-quick for thinking so when he would have hated to see Jack like this when he was alive. He’s dead, though, and so he gets none of Jack’s dry wit or arched eyebrows or endearingly brittle personality, no joint discoveries or eyes caught across the room or tipsy laughter on a balcony with his hand pressed into the crook of Jack’s elbow, and so he takes what he can have, and that is watching Jack weep for all that occurred in the devouring winter of the expedition. Eventually, he quiets. 

He’s torn between staying to make sure that someone comes for Jack, that he does not stay out all night alone, and the fear that remaining so close would draw the attention of the place that holds him far too squarely onto Jack. For all he knows, the darkness of that bay may be possessive, and Jack only narrowly escaped the depths of it. It is this thought that spurs him to leave, to face the slow, lingering unbecoming that waits for him in the Arctic, even though the waters here are filled with a living warmth from the heat of the day that both soothes him and chokes him with a terrible longing for what he has lost. The cold current looms against him, and he understands his time is up. Turning to go, he means to swim out to sea again and let it rock him back to unconsciousness, means to dissolve back into the icy blackness of the water, but he forgets how very close to the shore he is, and when he moves, he sees Jack start. Jack is at the water’s edge in a second, staring out to see, and he knows Jack has caught sight of him when his eyes widen and he rocks back on his heels, gasping, like a man punched in the gut. Panicked, he makes to flee, but Jack is on his feet again and shaking, breathless. 

“Gus,” he says, raggedly, and then again.

“Gus.”

It is something like a prayer, and in the ruined state he is in, he hopes Jack understands this is no heavenly opportunity for goodbyes and resolutions, that he is still rotting in the water and has no hope for anything but a descent further into the murky water. He hopes this not for himself but for Jack, for it would be a cruel sort of irony if his sudden appearance was what destroyed almost a year’s worth of fever-tossed recovery, and after all that has happened it would still be too much to see Jack still and pale and cold, even if it could somehow reunite them. He doesn’t turn around, forces himself to continue out, but a splash behind him makes him turn. Jack is knee deep in the water, and staring at him. 

“Please,’’ he says, “Stay.’’

When nothing happens, he sighs and sits down at the water’s edge, legs still submerged. 

“It’s too quiet here.” His voice is still shaking. 

“You never shut up, not once. I used to be surrounded not just by your voice, but the constant noise of you closing a door or getting your coat or brewing tea or rifling through a book, used to drive me absolutely mad, until I wanted to throw one of your books at you in the hopes that you’d stop. Now, though, I miss it. I miss your voice, Gus.” 

A flush touches the high points of his face, visible only in the moonlight as he tips his head away. He sounds embarrassed, but his voice is stronger now, without the waver.

“Isaak keeps me company, but there’s only so much space you can fill with a man and a dog and I sit and I think about how much you’d have loved this place until I can’t move for thinking. I pace around the house at night as if you’d somehow appear in the library or the garden, as if I’d come upon you and you’d catch my arm and tell me all about whichever new thing has fascinated you now. I have your old journal - Algie gave it to me - and I want for you to sit down at my table every night and make your careful sketches of each plant in my garden.” 

Jack’s voice breaks slightly on the last word, and he stops, abruptly. He looks as if he’s about to start to cry again, and that is too much for Gus to bear. His feet touch the sand again, and he moves unsteadily toward Jack, trying desperately to stay upright. He hears a quick indrawn breath as he surfaces, and regrets it, thinks it would have been easier for both of them if he had gone, but he feels a brush of warmth as Jack’s hand grips his wrist. 

“You’re cold.” Jack says, and he looks straight at Gus. 

He has not seen his own face in so long, so he cannot predict whether Jack will shy away, will be horrified or angered by what he sees. He knows from his hands that he is grey and pallid, purpled bruises pressed like fingerprints into his joints. He suspects his face is just as ruined, eye-sockets staring and skeletal, his face hollow-cheeked. Most of all, he is cold, icy as the depths of the bay, but though Jack hisses through his teeth at the glacial touch, he determinedly hangs on, refusing to break his hold. Jack takes a breath, and slowly, deliberately, seems to catalogue every change about him. For a split second, it looks as if he’ll speak, but seems to think better of it. He sighs, and lifts a hand to cup Gus’s cheek. 

The sudden burst of warmth is almost painful, living flesh on his dead skin, but he closes his eyes and leans into the touch. Jack’s hand is shaking, but firm, and he brings his own hand up to hold it. Jack jumps a little, at numbing press of it, and when Gus opens his eyes he sees Jack’s eyes soft and sad and old with sorrow. 

“You’re cold,” he says again, and pauses before shrugging off his jacket and putting it around Gus’s shoulders. It’s a practical thing, forest green and covered all over with pockets which he can feel are filled with any amount of odds and ends, and what seems to be a notebook and pencil in the breast pocket. Ridiculous, perhaps, to try to warm the dead, especially in such a laughably, casually human way that is so divorced from their current situation, but it is warm and heavy and so he finds the weight of it anchoring in the cold surf that plays around them. 

When he looks at Jack again, he’s not smiling, but he is close, and Gus feels a surge of affection flood him, and the warmth of it flushes through him and presses at the edges of the cold, forcing it back ever more. Jack is bright in the moonlight, hair still dishevelled and tear-tracks marking his face, but he’s flushed and alive and so, so brave. All Gus is is what terrified him, stalked him in the icy mouth of Gruhuken, but Jack has not once looked away from his face, not shied away from touching him or being touched, determined not to cause him pain, and Gus thinks again of fairy stories and old folklore: hold me fast and fear me not. 

Bringing Jack’s hand to his mouth, he presses a kiss to it, and holds on.


End file.
